A large number of search queries contain one or more terms or entities which are capable of being understood in multiple ways. This requires the search engine to determine when a term might be ambiguous and to ascertain which category or sense the user intended for the ambiguous term.
Some methods and systems rely on a vast gamut of knowledge databases, such as dictionaries and thesauri. The knowledge databases may also contain documents, which can provide a context that is associated with a particular sense of a term. Other methods and systems classify words by assigning a context probability to a particular meaning. However, these methods and systems do not account for user preferences or patterns in determining the most probable sense of an ambiguous term or entity.